http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=cpu_mining

-MarkM-

When you send coins it has to use existing outputs from existing transactions to make up the amount.

Often of course no existing outputs add up to the desired amount.

Thus it uses previous outputs that add up to more than enough, and sends "the change" to a new "change address" that it creates for the purpose of receiving your change.

I have heard that clients nowadays automatically "re-scan" the blockchain when they need to, but certainly the older code did not do that and I am nor convinced the new ones can always tell if you switched the wallet. So in the past you always had to deliberately tell it to re-scan if you switched the wallet out from under it. Such as when you import a key.

TO tell it to re-scan you start it with -rescan as one of the switches on its command-line.

(In a GUI the command-line is usually one of the "properties" of the shortcut or icon or menu-item; the command-line that it in effect types for you behind the scenes when you click that shortcut or icon or menu-item.)

I used to always have -rescan on the commandline in my "start the daemon" script just in case the reason I was having to start the thing was that a power outage or reboot had killed the one that had previously been running, possibly leaving the wallet in an inconsistent state or something. It is this usage of -rescan that I have been told is not needed in recent clients; supposedly the client or daemon should notice for itself if it is in an inconsistent state due to having crashed/died previously. Merely importing a key might not trigger a rescan, I do not know but I would think it would be awkward to automatically re-scan when someone imports a key because they might have another key and another key and another key and so on that they want to import before finally being ready to do the re-scan, and it would be very painful to have to wait for a full re-scan between each key and the next.

I have always used an external tool to import keys too, so I close down the daemon, use a tool to import a key or bunch of keys, then restart with -rescan so it will re-scan the blockchain to check for any transactions involving any keys in the wallet thus find any balance associated with the added keys.

-MarkM-

Yes I agree, bitcoin got painted into a corner by their existing marketing all over the web etc much of which could not be changed (gosh knows who made this that or the other webpage or article or press release etc, good luck getting all the newspapers to publish retractions or whatever etc etc etc) claiming transactions were free, then later that transactions could be free and even when not free were negligible cost and on and on backpedalling.

-MarkM-

For these maybe either the Mastercoin platform or the Bitshares platform might work, depending on whether either of those platforms does turn out to actually work itself.

Both platforms have among their target features the ability to attempt to "peg" a currency to something.

Thus if either works it ought to be possible to run your twelve fiat-related currencies as actually being pegged to the corresponding fiats.

Japanese Yen Coin for example makes little or no sense if in fact it is entirely unrelated to Japanese Yen.

Mastercoin and Bitshares are two different technology platforms aiming to implement such relationships.

Of the two and assuming they actually turn out to work, which remains to be seen, I tend to prefer bitshares simply because Mastercoin calls for "trusted oracles". However they also plan "contracts for difference" as an alternative approach; I am not sure yet whether their "contracts for difference" also involve oracles or whether, like certain setups of "long coins and short coins", they will operate without needing to know the "actual prices" of things or even whether markets even exist for such things.

(With "long coins and short coins" people just trade the long and short coins, the system needs no information about what prices the things being shorted or longed might or might not have out in the world, it is possible for both players to profit even since each might know of a place where they can get a good price for one of the things, so that each ends up with the thing he or she can get the best price for. There is no need for them to reveal to each other what those best prices are nor where or how one would go about getting such a price. At most you could deduce, if the players are rational, the approximate prices those specific actors "must presumably think they can get somewhere" for the thing they choose to walk away with. Like "Oh gosh he paid that much for one of those? He must know a place that pays a lot more for those than people in my neighborhood do!" kind of thing.)

-MarkM-

So far you sound too much like all the kiddies throwing out coin after coin after coin to crash and burn.

The impression I get is that you want to churn out even more crapcoins, but make them look slicker so they sucker more fools into losing their money.

Before even one coin is actually up and running and secured already you are on about more different coins.

No ASICs taped out yet to secure the first one, less than half of the hashing power still - none at all that you have mentioned, actually - and already you seem to be moving on to yet another coin.

So basically a serial scammer with a slick con-man plan to paper-over the intrinsic fundamental lack of ability to actually secure even one coin with a plan to keep churning out newer slicker scams leaving a trail of victims holding a series of pretty bags.

The entire cryptocoin community all working together is incapable of even just supporting the coins we already have, let alone securing them, yet your plan is to kick all the victims of all those ponzi schemes to the kerb and wow them with newer better ponzi schemes that will victimise more of them faster and maybe even bilk them out of more money per victim than the existing scams.

Sounds like a scammer olympics in which you aim to be the slickest scammer of all...

How about putting your skills to work doing something constructive, like rescuing some of the victims already strewn all over the landscape, putting shiny attractive skins onto something that might actually be secure and worthwhile, basically use your skills to try to ensure that the public does not get sucked in by more and more scams but instead recognises at a glance the most secure places to store their wealth and finds them more attractive than the scams constantly being spewed out?

-MarkM-

A good way to cash in on your skills then could be to develop good branding / creatives / logo / etc for an existing coin that already does actually work and is actually secure.

There is such a wide spread of coins available that, as you yourself say, need skills such as yours applied to them.

Some of them you can pick up lots of dirt cheap.

If as you seem to think your skills can enhance the value of a coin, you should be able to make fortunes just picking up large numbers of dirt cheap coins, giving their clients, websites and so on a facelift, nice new logo, landing-pages, motto (I forget the name, a catchy string of words) and so on.

If you cannot do that then I would have to wonder about your ability to carry-through, to continue making the brand's "creative" fresh and new and appealing and responsive to what is going on around it. (Like for example how DOGE comes out with new timely memes in response to what is going on in the world even such things as religious or secular holiday-seasons and such...)

The under the hood stuff well heck as you say the end user just cares that it works.

So it would make more sense maybe to go to town doing awesome branding for Bitcoin itself, that already works and is closer than any other coin to actually managing to secure its blockchain, than to waste your awesome abilities on something that is vulnerable to attack.

-MarkM-

Well admittedly the cost/benefits is different for you lot now than it was for me the first day when the thing was launched.

Once it got difficult I stopped mining it. So for me the cost of the protoshares I have was negligible, some of those fancy coffee-shops probably have foreign-sounding coffee-like drinks that cost more than one day of electricity usage.

So I guess I have been using an opposite tactic: instead of cashing in fast because it cost a lot of money to mine it that I might not make back, I mined it fast so it would hardly cost anything so I can afford to hold it long.

-MarkM-

The "scale" factor in markets in Open Transactions hopefully will help with this kind of thing, because if you want to deal in thousands of something instead of individual ones of it or tens of it or hundreds of it or lots of ten-thousand of it etc you trade on the 1000-scale market.

-MarkM-

But they make that money by suckering people into buying into an insecure chain, deliberately screwing the actual poor, which is to say, the people who cannot afford even a GPU so are forced to buy into all the ponzi schemes aka altcoins the rich people who are able to not only afford GPUs but also electricity enough to power GPUs keep creating.

So basically you are advocating stealing from the actual poor, and justifying it on the basis that you can steal from them cheaper if you get to use your existing password-cracking rig than if you had to actually buy a little dongle that even poor folk could maybe manage to scrounge up enough electricity to run.

All along knowing full well that your daily new ponzi scams are deliberate scams.

-MarkM-

Do you seriously prefer all the heat and hassle of GPUs to the nice cute little USB mining dongles?

USB dongles could let scrypt mining spread to the masses without fear that a bunch of password crackers with banks of GPUs will PWN the coins; instead they will have to blow a fraction of the cost of a GPU on a specialised cute little munchkin miner.

What is so awful about that?

GPUs are a pain to deal with. Little USB munchkin miners are way the heck less hassle and heat and space and motherboards and so on.

-MarkM-

The whole point of protoshares is that at least one other DAC is going to be released, and when it is you get parts of that in accordance with how many protoshares you hold.

So the more profitable the new ones being released, the more valuable protoshares are since if you have protoshares you will get some of each of the new ones.

So no matter how profitable they turn out to be, presumably protoshares are even more profitable.

-MarkM-

Whatever is in my github repo is what I have been using all along.

As far as I know whatever mmpool has been using is based on that or mine is based on his, from way back when.

No idea what other pools might have used.

-MarkM-

Time? But there has not been any time has there? We are still discussing deploying the new version. If some minority of nodes has been running it from time to time like these two people who ran it to try to send each other coins have they even actually generated any blocks with it?

Or is the fact that the blockchain wasn't broken yet simply due to their low hash power that happened to cause no blocks to even be in the chain yet that they created?

Is there a list anywhere of blocks that could only have been generated by a node that has this change in it?

Maybe they have tried to form such blocks but the network has consistently rejected them thus they did not make it into the blockchain?

Have any of the merged mining pools used the new code yet?

My private p2pool certainly hasn't.

There no non merged mined devcoin pools are there?

Has any solo miner used it long enough to actually find a block yet?

(How many months does that take?)

-MarkM-

Who tested the spam-proofing?

I do not recall even hearing about any attempts at spamming, nor any analysis of how much it would cost to achieve how much of what kind of effect by spamming.

Maybe spammers have been holding off a while antic
ipating it becoming five times cheaper to spam so are waiting until more than 50% of the network is ready to let them spam cheaply?

Devcoin is not really up a lot in price compared to bitcoin, so as long as we simply use 1000 (or maybe nowadays 2000 would be better now we mint 2000 times as many coins as bitcoin) we should continue to inherit bitcoins' analysis and calculation of how much the various aspects of fee ought best be set to.

Maybe more than 2000 even since really a value of only 1/200 that of bitcoin is a max not a likelihood.

This is why I have always figured we'd just be doing the same usually changes to bitcoin code that we did originally: multiple all their span fix figures by a multiplier intended to reflect jow much less than a bitcoin we expect a devcoin to be worth.

Presumably we'd also inherit their expert analysis of which changes are forking ones that need to come into effect at a certain block number, as we'd see that when they changed their fee they did or did not do it as a change set to come into effect at a certain block.

So basically they'd continue to do most of the work for us.

-MarkM-

Someone told me once upon a time that seeds are not nodes but, rather, hostnames / subdomains / domains whose DNS is on a modified DNS-server, one that has been modified to use the list of current live nodes to populate the hostname with currently live nodes.

So basically instead of merely plugging into your DNS a whole bunch of IP addresses that people have claimed they would maintain nodes at, your DNS server itself answers DNS queries with the IP address of nodes that actually are alive at the time and actually do have their incoming port open at the time.

-MarkM-

I don't think we should just arbitrarily keep a typo that so far hasn't happened to fork the chain if it is indeed a forking change.

If it is for sure that no old client will fork upon seeing a free the typo puts into the blockchain then it is not a forking change so is not important.

Any forking change though should be scheduled for some far-future block then we start warning people over the year or two it will take to come into effect that some time in those coming blocks they will need to get around to updating their clients/daemons.

-MarkM-

Huh? Your points merely underline the fact that securing a blockchain based currency is insanely massively expensive and difficult.

You evidently agree with me that even Bitcoin, with all the millions or billions spent on it so far, is still not secure.

The whole https ecosystem is insecure, it is itself a man in the middle attack in effect, even ignoring all the demonstrated hacks against it.

It seems mostly to install a false sense of security into people.

So yes work is going on to develop and deploy better security than https.

In the meanwhile signatures work fine, and if your grandmother or who-ever cannot handle signatures then isn't that a business-opportunity to come up with something better than the broken-by-design https system and the inability of the marketers / educators / browser or client interface designers to design a signature system that grandma can understand?

Oh wait, my distro does check signatures when it downloads and installs packages, doesn't yours?

Yes there is lots of work still to be done to secure even just one single chain.

Blockchains are insanely expensive to secure. It is not even clear yet that even one single blockchain can be secured, let alone more than one.

Maybe blockchains are just too impractical for real world use and we need something better.

-MarkM-

A ponzi that has a fancy office with nice carpets and so on is still a scam.

Put your pretty cosmetics and marketing onto something actually worthwhile, something that is not so pathetically insecure that a stupid meme can dwarf its hashing power overnight....

People do not particularly like banks that leave their vaults wide open so that a flash crowd conjured up overnight by an internet meme can just walk in and take all the money.

The fancy carpets are mere con-job, scam, bullshit, part of the scam, if there is not first off a vault...

So first off design your ASIC, so your chain will not be vulnerable to any other chain's ASICs.

Then launch the ASICs the same day you launch the chain, and hope that defenders of the chain buy more of them than attackers do.

Cute dog shaped USB ASICs might turn out to sell really well. Or maybe not.

But don't just have the cute little stocking-stuffer USB ones for the masses, also have serious 28 or 20 nano process node rigs for the businesses, banks, etc to use so they can feel confident their money will be secure.

-MarkM-

s/troops/miners/g ; s/armed/equipped with ASICs, FPGAs, GPUs, etc: hashing power aka force of the type suited to the analogy aka arena/g

In other words no coin is safe if it does not have sufficient dedicated mining power, of its own not gangbangers from what chain to rape this hour type pools etc.

-MarkM-

Is it true that the only thing that sells more/better than humour is sex?

If so presumably to be more than a joke it will want to be a sex thing of some kind?

-MarkM-